BCR Questions

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Beat reporters left the building

In 2010, the small city of Bell, CA was front page news nationwide. Over 17 years, the city manager and other municipal officials bilked tax payers out of millions of dollars. The LA Times won a Pulitzer for reporting on this story but it had paid no routine attention to this "cesspool of corruption" during the many years the fraud was active.

The entire program is worthy of your time because the same decline in beat reporting has occurred here. If, as some of us suspect, high level political and commercial corruption exists in British Columbia, it is a safe bet that the corporate media has no ability or interest in reporting the stories.

The advertising agency behind the BC Liberal government’s $335,000 online campaign against the striking B.C. Teachers’ Federation is the same company that designed the party’s logo, and its founder boasts a long association with Premier Christy Clark.

BCParentInfo.ca is a U.S.-hosted website that carries the government’s side in the dispute with public school teachers, including news releases and statements from Education Minister Peter Fassbender. It also includes a link to the online form for parents seeking the government’s $40-a-day compensation plan. The Ministry of Education confirmed the advertising and design contractor is Kimbo Design Inc. of Vancouver. The contract was not publicly tendered.

I found this quite interesting today on the picket line. In the religious private school parents don't pay a penny more than the parents in the public schools. They write it all off as a charitable donation to the Church sponsoring the school. So people are making a mockery of the public school system.

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